Interview with Love Kills author Kyle Jarrow on actorslife.com

Love Kills author Kyle Jarrow is interviewed on actorslife.com about his new emo rock musical, premiering as part of NYMF.

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Interviewed by Joanna Parson for actorslife.com Tell us about your new musical, Love Kills.  What is it about?   LOVE KILLS is about Charlie Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Fugate, who murdered eleven people in 1958.  As the first teenage spree killers in American history, they were also the inspiration for the movies Badlands and Natural Born Killers, and the forerunners to the current sad trend of school shootings.  Youth and violence are two of America’s great obsessions, and their story combines both—maybe that’s the reason for its lasting impact.  Anyway, my show is set during the night after their arrest, when they’re interrogated by the local sheriff and his wife.  In the course of this night, Caril ends up turning against Charlie (which really happened). The show looks at why she made this choice, and in the meantime explores the intersection of love and desire. It's called an "emo rock musical."  How is the music incorporated into the show?  Is it a traditional musical where songs played by an offstage band are sung by actors to further the action of the story? The emo style, and bands like My Chemical Romance or Sunny Day Real Estate, really capture the angst and raw emotionalism of adolescence.  That’s why it seemed the perfect choice of musical style to tell this story of young love gone bad.  The songs do integrate into the plot, but the band is going to be onstage, and the songs are going to be loud—it’s going to feel like a rock show.   When and why did you become interested in the subject matter of lovers on a crime spree as the protagonists for a musical? What got me excited me about the story wasn’t the violence, but the opportunity it provided to explore the changing nature of love by comparing Charlie and Caril’s relationship with that of the sheriff and his wife.  Basically, I wanted to write a love story that asked: is the intensity of young love a good thing, or an unhealthy thing?  When love becomes calmer with time and age, is that a natural maturation or a kind of loss?   You've produced shows at many different venues—why did you decide to debut Love Kills at the New York Musical Theatre Festival? NYMF asked me if I’d be willing to debut LOVE KILLS with them, and I thought it sounded like a great opportunity—an ideal showcase for a new piece.  Jason Southerland, the director who’s been working with me on it since the first reading, agreed.  So we went for it.   You quote yourself on your web site as saying that "Musicals tend to suck."  What do you mean by that? I just don’t like most musicals.  It’s a taste thing—to me, there’s often something that feels awkward about traditional book musicals.  But I think music can bring a lot to the theater experience, and shows like Hedwig or Spring Awakening or Cynthia Hopkins’s Must Don’t Whip ‘Em, to name a few, really do rock.  I guess I hope to add to that canon: to create musicals that really do rock.  ...Continued... You can see the whole interview at http://actorslife.com/article.php?id=133